Abstract

Clay/Ceramics tends to be approached and treated as separate from other arts both in terms of practice and of study. Thus Art History rearely engages with ceramics. Despite the ‘material turn’ a response to new materialism, which has informed all fields of art history, ceramics remains very much an outsider. Scholarly and journalistic writing on ceramics rarely engages in critical depth with currents in other fields of art history, including histories of sculpture, painting or architecture. Often the study of ceramics is presented in purely technical terms. To what extent is this a field which is more or less separate, in which specialists talk to other specialists, surrounded at a distance by a growing body of amateurs, but with a more or less unbridgeable gulf between the professional,amateur, and interpretive/scholarly worlds? This panel will interrogate this suggestion. Is is a caricature? How true is it? What are the limits and what are their causes that operate in these fields? What can be done to open these fields up to each other more? And what of the future?